China's new ethnic unity law legalising cultural 'erasure', minorities warn at UN

GENEVA, Switzerland: Tibetan and Uyghur representatives urged countries at a United Nations meeting to pressure China to repeal a new law they say is aimed at erasing minority communities.

The Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, which comes into effect on July 1, aims to forge a “shared” national identity among ethnic groups and “strengthen cohesion”.

But rights advocates charge it has been shaped to provide Beijing with legal cover for pursuing long-existing policies of forced assimilation across the vast country with the Han majority.

Among other things, the law criminalises engaging in “violent terrorist activities, ethnic separatist activities, or religious extremist activities”.

UN rights chief Volker Turk has called for “the law to be repealed”, warning before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva earlier this month that it risked “deepening restrictions on freedoms of language, education, practice of religion, culture, expression and assembly”.

During a council side event on Friday, Tibetan and Uyghur representatives starkly described how they said their cultural, religious and linguistic identities were being criminalised.

‘Cultural genocide’

With the law, Tibetans “are no longer legally allowed to exist”, Thinlay Chukki, the representative of the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in central and eastern Europe, told the event, warning of a “cultural genocide”.

It is “legislating the erasure of Tibetans as a Tibetan identity, as a Tibetan culture, as a Tibetan language”, she told AFP.

China officially recognises 55 official ethnic minorities within its borders that speak hundreds of languages and dialects.

But government policies have already directed that Mandarin Chinese be used as the language of instruction in some areas with large minority populations, including Tibet.

Chukki said the law was legalising a system already in place of forcibly sending Tibetan children to residential boarding schools, where they were “subjected forcibly to the Mandarin language, as well as the Han Chinese culture”.

Activists say a similar boarding school system also exists in the Xinjiang region, where the UN has warned of possible crimes against humanity targeting the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority — something China vehemently denies.

Beijing wants “to disrupt our entire identity, to disconnect generations”, Zumretay Arkin, the vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, told AFP.

The new law, she warned, “will completely eradicate Uyghur identity, heritage, religion. It will coerce people into adopting Han Chinese identity”.

‘Sinister’

Bhuchung Tsering, head of the research and monitoring unit at the International Campaign for Tibet, decried the “sinister tactic to go after the youngest and to detach them from their culture”.

Speaking to AFP prior to Friday’s event, he pointed to numerous anecdotes of Tibetan children already “not able to converse with their parents”.

He also pointed to two clauses of the law: one ordering parents to “teach their children about this new identity”, and the other urging citizens to report on non-compliance with the law.

“If you read these two together, it’s virtually forcing children to report on their parents,” he said.

During Friday’s event, a Chinese representative in the audience defended the law and slammed the “countries and organisations that consistently use human rights as a political tool to smear China”.

‘Transnational oppression’

The Tibetan and Uyghur speakers urged the other diplomats there and the UN to push China to repeal the legislation, highlighting in particular a clause that could hold people and organisations overseas liable for violating the new law.

This risked seeing “China increase use of transnational oppression against dissidents and activists and human rights defenders”, Arkin cautioned.

China’s Vice Justice Minister Hu Weilie told a news briefing last week that the clause was “legitimate” and “conforms to international practice”.